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South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has refused to step down as parliament prepares to set up an impeachment committee over his handling of the Phala Phala farm robbery.

Some shit you should know before you dig in: The Phala Phala scandal goes back to 2020, when thieves broke into Ramaphosa’s private game farm in South Africa’s Limpopo province and made off with around $580,000 in foreign cash (some early reports put the figure as high as $4 million) that had been stashed inside a sofa cushion. Ramaphosa claimed the money was proceeds from buffalo he’d sold to a businessman from Sudan, but he took a beating from critics who said he never properly notified police or tax officials about the theft and questioned why that kind of cash was sitting in furniture instead of a bank account. Shit really hit the fan in 2022 when former intelligence chief Arthur Fraser filed a criminal complaint, claiming the president’s security detail had hunted down those involved in the robbery, abducted them, and paid them off to stay silent. A parliamentary panel later concluded there was evidence that Ramaphosa may have crossed lines in how he handled the situation, but his African National Congress party leveraged its parliamentary majority that December to shoot the report down. Prosecutors ultimately passed on filing criminal charges in 2024, and Ramaphosa has stuck to his denials the whole way through.

What’s going on now: Ramaphosa announced in a televised address to the nation Monday evening that he won’t be stepping aside and plans to head to court to challenge the 2022 parliamentary panel report that found evidence of possible misconduct. He called the report deeply flawed and said it leaned on secondhand information.

The president’s refusal comes after South Africa’s Constitutional Court ruled Friday that parliament had no legal grounds to dismiss the impeachment process back in 2022, reviving the case and sending it back to lawmakers. The court instructed parliament to give the panel report a proper review, opening the door to a full impeachment inquiry. Parliament’s lower house confirmed Monday that its speaker will form a committee to weigh the evidence and decide whether formal proceedings should move forward, a process expected to drag on for several months.

Two opposition parties, the Economic Freedom Fighters and the African Transformation Movement, were behind the original court challenge that triggered the ruling, and both have called on the president to step aside.

Even if an impeachment committee recommends moving ahead with impeachment, kicking the president out of office requires backing from two-thirds of the 400-seat National Assembly, a bar opposition lawmakers almost certainly can’t clear. The ANC still holds more than a third of the seats even after taking heavy losses in the 2024 elections, which is enough to shield Ramaphosa from removal.